3 Easy Edits for Better Emotional Descriptions

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

The wrong words can flatten the right feelings—learn how to spot them and breathe emotion back into your scenes.

Ever read a scene that should hit you right in the feels, but somehow doesn’t? The words are there, the setup is solid, but emotionally, it falls flat. 

That disconnect often comes down to the wrong word in the right place. A frown where there should be fear. A smile that doesn’t carry the weight of what’s unspoken. 

The smallest word choices can make or break a reader’s emotional connection—and when that connection breaks, so does their investment in the story.

The right word can mean the difference between connecting emotionally with a reader and having them forget a character’s name. The more they connect, the more likely it is that they’ll love the story. The more they love the story, the more likely they are to tell all their friends about it and buy the next one. 

Throw Rocks at Your Characters (It’s Good for Them!)

By Angela Ackerman

Part of the How They Do It Series

JH: Sending a character into an emotional spiral is a great way to add conflict to scene or build more tension in a novel. Angela Ackerman joins us today to share tips on how to stress out our characters to create better stories.

Take it away, Angela...

 
If there’s one thing we all know, it’s that life is stressful. Each day, we’re bombarded with obstacles, challenges, and upsets. We navigate what we can, go to bed, and do it all again the next day.

Do we like stress? No. But adversity builds resiliency. Problem-solving under pressure means we push onward, try new things, and learn on the go. Our trials help us gain new skills, competency, and confidence. In short, we grow!

Do You Feel It? Writing With Emotional Layers

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Just like your plot has layers, consider the emotional layers of your story. 

Emotions are like a complex soup, where every sip brings a new experience and you never know what’s bubbling just under the surface. They might be scalding or cold, sweet or spicy, weak or cloying.

Often, they’re multiple feelings at once.

You might be happy for a friend who just got a promotion, but envious because you were passed over for one. Or thrilled for a sister marrying the man of her dreams, but worried because this is marriage number five for him.

“It’s complicated” is a real thing, and characters struggle with those same emotional challenges.

When diving into a scene, think about the various emotions your characters are feeling, and how you can use those layers to deepen the scene and connect with the reader. Ask yourself:

Are Your Characters Living in the Moment or Watching it Pass By?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy 

Put yourself in a scene before you put your characters there.

Years ago, there was a bit of a scare in the Hardy household. Our oldest cat took a tumble and hurt his hind leg. He was fine (he just limped for a few days), but until I knew he was okay, I was a basket case. For the rest of the day, I was a nervous Momma, and that continued until my little guy was back to his old self.

In the grand scene of things, it was no big deal.

To me, it was a huge crisis. Someone I loved was hurt.

Even worse, someone vulnerable I loved was hurt and needed my help.

Turning Good Writing into Great Writing

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

The first words you write aren’t always the right words to use.

Tuesday, I spent at least a half hour writing one line—and it wasn’t an opening line. I was working on a new scene for my science fiction detective novel, and it’s an emotion-packed scene right after the Dark Moment that tacks onto the All Is Lost Moment. It’s one those “this is where the protagonist reveals secrets they’d been keeping from someone important in their life, and it goes badly” situations.

I reached the end of the scene and had my upset character storm off, and then dropped the last line of the chapter.

I knew the final line was the right way to end, but it just felt meh.

I also knew the action lines leading up to it were the right ones, but they also felt meh.

Emotions and the Body: Less Cliché Ways the Body Responds to Emotional States

By Bonnie Randall

Part of The How They Do It Series

JH: If a cliché is a cliché for a reason, is it still a cliché? Bonnie Randall shares how common emotional responses actually connect with readers.

The other day I read a writing article that really lambasted authors who ‘overuse’ so-called clichéd emotional responses for their characters. “Readers,” the article said, “are really sick of hearing that someone’s gut dropped when they were startled or that their belly got loose when they were scared.”

I confess my heart sank (heh heh) when I saw this. First, as an author, I get a little shirty when I hear that readers are sick of this or sick of that. The snarky curmudgeon in me says “Well then maybe they should write their own damn books!” Second, though, those so-called clichés exist for a reason.

How to Punch Readers in the Feels: A Case Study

By José Pablo Iriarte, @LabyrinthRat

Part of the Focus on Short Fiction Series

JH: The best stories do more than just tell a tale. José Pablo Iriarte shares tips on how to pull more emotion from your plot.

As luck would have it, my newest published short story hit the world this week: "Proof by Induction," in Uncanny Magazine, a story about grief and about mathematics. If you want to see an example of what I mean when I talk about short fiction craft, I hope you'll check it out. (Content warning: death of a parent.) You can find the issue online here, or go straight to the story here. You can read the story for free online, but if you like what you see at Uncanny, I would encourage you to subscribe to them through Weightless Books or Amazon, or support them on Patreon. You can also buy this individual issue here. If you're a reader of this website, you know that good fiction is worth supporting, so that magazines like Uncanny can keep on publishing it.

4 Ways to Create Emotional Peril in Your Characters

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

If you can’t get readers to emotionally connect with your novel, they won’t read your novel.

When you pick up a novel, what keeps you reading?

The desire to see what happens next? The fear that something horrible will happen to your favorite character? The need to see it all turn out for the best? The need to know what happens next or what it all means? Maybe all of these at different times in the book.

No matter what hooks a reader about a book, they’ve made an emotional connection with it. They care, and don't want to see the characters get hurt. But the wonderful thing is, once you've made that emotional connection, "hurt" takes on a much broader definition.

How Do You Write a Great Story? Go Hot, Go Deep

By Dario Ciriello, @Dario_Ciriello 

Part of The How They Do It Series

JH: Skimming the surface of your story might work for an early brainstorming session, but it won't get you the novel you really want. Dario Ciriello shares tips on how to dig deeper for a strong novel. 

Many years ago, the legendary, multiple award-winning editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Gardner Dozois, was telling my Clarion West class about the magazine’s slushpile. Once you got rid of the garbage, he said, you were left with quite a few publishable stories. The challenge then was finding the one that stood out from all the “not bad” ones, the story that achieved greatness and would resonate with readers. A few years later, when I had my own slushpile for the Panverse series of SFF novella anthologies I edited and published, I discovered he was absolutely right. And in the several years since, working as a freelance editor/copyeditor, I find the same to be true.

How to Shame Your Characters and Win Readers

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

If your characters aren’t hiding shameful secrets, you’re missing an opportunity for a stronger story.

Close your eyes and think about your most shameful secret. Feel that twist in your gut? That flush creeping across your skin? Have you pulled in on yourself, maybe crossed your arms and hunched your shoulders?

Remember those feelings, because you can make serious use of them in your writing.

Few things motivate a character like the fear of shameful secrets coming to light. It doesn’t even have to be a really bad secret, just one that makes a character cringe and wish it never happened. Maybe they bullied someone. Maybe they stole something. Maybe they dropped the vial of zombie virus and started the apocalypse.

Whatever it is, it hurts them to think about it and horrifies them that someone else might find out—or worse—call them on it. It saps their confidence, pops into their mind at the worst times, and can ruin an otherwise excellent day.

And that’s a good thing.

The Importance of Backstory (Or How the Brain Connects the Present to the Past)

By Kassandra Lamb, @KassandraLamb

Part of the How They Do It Series

JH: Your character's emotional reactions stem from their backstories, and when those don't mesh, reader disconnects can happen. Kassandra Lamb explains how the brain can help us write stronger character backstories. 

Kassandra Lamb is a retired psychotherapist/ psychology professor turned mystery writer. She is the author of the Kate Huntington Mysteries and the Marcia Banks and Buddy Cozy Mysteries, plus a non-fiction guidebook, Someday is Here! A Beginner’s Guide to Writing and Publishing Your First Book. She also writes romantic suspense under the pen name of Jessica Dale.

Her specialty as a psychotherapist was trauma recovery, and today she brings us her insights into how the brain connects our past to our present, and the implications for writers regarding characters’ back stories.

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest | Bookbub Profile | Goodreads

Take it away Kassandra…

Scaredy-Pants! 4 Breeches-er- BREACHES That Elicit Fear in Your Characters

By Bonnie Randall

Part of the How They Do It Series

JH: Fear is a powerful tool for writers and helps us create stronger stories. Bonnie Randall takes her month place at the podium today to share tips on how to scare the pants off our characters. And if you're in the mood for some good old fashion scares for Halloween...checkout her short story No Vacancy. It's creepy and scary in all the right ways.

Take it away Bonnie...

When something happens that shouldn’t happen OR when something that should happen doesn’t, the results range from feeling mildly jarred to all-out terrified. Breaches to different cognitive constructs are the underpinnings of fear.

Here are four that may resonate if you’re crafting (or watching) frightening fiction this spooky season:

Writing Emotional Truth—What Gets Us There?

By Bonnie Randall 

Part of the How They Do It Series 

JH: For many writers, (but not all), we want to tap into the emotional truth of our stories, and our characters. Bonnie Randall is back this month to share tips on getting to the emotional truth in our stories. 

Emotional truth. It is an indistinct quality; nebulous, indirect, and implicit between the lines of our prose. It is also—in my opinion—the difference between good writing and great writing. The contrast between cardboard, out-of-sync characters, and living, breathing beings with whom your relationship continues long after you’ve read the last page.

Emotional truth can be difficult to capture, and impossible to master, but there are tricks that can help make it easier to weave into your fiction.

You're So Emotional: Describing a Character's Emotions in a First Person Point of View

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

A first-person narrator has a unique set of challenges, and describing emotions is one of them. 

For many readers, emotion is a big reason why they picked up a particular novel. They want to feel connected to the characters, experience life through their eyes, escape into their worlds. Bringing those emotions to the surface is critical to bringing the story alive.

Except sometimes, we go overboard and shift from emotion to melodrama. Our protagonists are too whiny, too stuck in their heads, to self-aware of what they're feeling all the time and that's draws attention away from the story.

This is particularly easy to do with a first-person narrator, because everything is so deep in that character's point of view. If we go emotionally overboard, our characters don't feel like natural people, because no one walks around fully aware of every little feeling they have and why they have it.

How Your Setting Can Affect Your Characters

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Your setting can help you craft better scenes. 

Setting is an often underused tool. We all create one, usually more than one, but we don't always take advantage of what the right setting can do for our novels--the setting is just "a place where the novel takes place," not something crafted to serve the story.

This is a missed opportunity, because setting can bring out subtleties in the story and deepen an entire scene. It can evoke both character and reader emotions.

Let's say you have scene where you want your protagonist to feel uncomfortable, because she's confronting a co-worker who just stabbed her in the back at work, and she dislikes both the co-worker and confrontation.

Where would you set it?

Using Vocal Cues to Show Hidden Emotion

By Becca Puglisi, @beccapuglisi

Part of The How They Do It Series

JH: Tapping into the hidden emotions and subtext of a scene is a wonderful way to pull readers into that scene. Becca Puglisi visits the lecture hall today to share her tips on creating subtext and using vocal cues to show the hidden emotional layers of your characters.

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and author of bestselling books for writers—including her latest publication: a second edition of The Emotion Thesaurus, an updated and expanded version of the original volume. Her books are available in multiple languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online library created to help writers elevate their storytelling.

Website | Goodreads | Facebook | Twitter |

Take it away Becca...

5 Ways to Convey Emotions in Your Novel

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Emotions are critical in most novels, but writing them can sometimes be a challenge.  

Describing outward emotions can often sound forced because people in the moment feeling those emotions aren't usually thinking, "I just want to stare deeply into his eyes." They're thinking about the color, the way the other person makes their heart race, how time seems to stop when their gazes meet. It's the effect of that deep gazing that's on their minds not the actual gazing part.

Let's say you're writing a situation that requires an emotional response. Instead of looking at the character who's about to become emotional in some way, try going inside her head and thinking about what that person would feel.

Alternative Ways to Describe Character Reactions

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Human emotion is universal, so it's easy to use the same description over and over. Here are ways to keep your emotional descriptions fresh. 

I frequently receive questions about finding good alternative ways to use common reaction/emotion words. He smiled. She gulped. He frowned. She cringed. (Actually, that’s a story right there, isn’t it? He sounds like a stalker to me) Anyway…

These words get used a lot because they’re good words and get the point we're trying to make across. Smiling to show happiness, frowning to show displeasure, gulping to show fear. But after a while, characters reacting to the same emotions the same way over and over feels repetitive.

However, switching it up too much can lead to overwriting. If a character never smiles, but beams, smirks, grins, curls a lip, corners of the mouth rise, and all the other various ways we write to say "smile," it can feel awkward. Like "said," "smiled" and the like are fairly invisible, so while readers do notice them, they don't tend to stick out unless they are too many of them.

Why the Ending of Galaxy Quest Always Makes Me Cry

By David Mack, @DavidAlanMack

Part of The Writer's Life Series

JH: Stories have the power to inspire us, move us, and profoundly change us. Please help me welcome David Mack to the lecture hall today, to share a story that moves him, and explain why we should never take what we do for granted.

David Mack is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty novels of science fiction, fantasy, and adventure.Mack’s writing credits span several media, including television (for episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), short fiction, and comic books. His new novel The Iron Codex is available now from Tor Books.

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads | Tor

Take it away David...

Getting to the Heart of the Matter: Infusing Emotion into Fiction

By Charissa Weaks,@charissaweaks

Part of the How They Do It Series

JH: Emotion helps readers connect to characters, and in some genre, it's a key component of the novel. Charissa Weaks visits the lecture hall today to share some tips on how to add emotion to your fiction.

Charissa Weaks is an author of historical fantasy and speculative fiction. She crafts stories with magic, time travel, romance, and history, and the occasional apocalyptic quest. When she’s not writing, you can find Charissa digging through four-hundred-year-old texts for research or cuddled with her pups.

Charissa lives just south of Nashville with her husband and children. She is active in the Historical Novel Society, has been named President and PRO-Liason for her local Romance Writers of America chapter, and is a member of the Women’s Fiction Association. She’s also the creator and editor of Once Upon Anthologies.

To keep up with her writing endeavors, join her newsletter, The Monthly Courant.

Website | Goodreads | Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest |

Take it away Charissa...